In general, electronic components generate thermal energy, or heat, when in operation. Such electronic components may include, for example, microprocessors, memory chips, graphic chips, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips, laser diodes, solar cells and the like. This heat must be removed, or dissipated, in order to achieve optimum performance and keep the electronic components within their safe operating temperature. With the form factor of electronic components and the applications they are implemented in becoming ever more compact, it is imperative to dissipate the high-density heat generated in a small footprint area to ensure safe operation of such heat-generating electronic components.
In applications that involve lasers, for example, significant challenges exist in the development of a highly efficient and compact package design of a heat dissipation mechanism to dissipate more than 1 kilowatt per square centimeter (1 kW/cm.sup.2). As another example, in solar cell panels, where solar cells are exposed to sunlight and from which solar energy is extracted, the amount of solar energy produced by each solar cell is limited by the heat dissipation mechanism of the design of the solar cell panel. That is, a solar cell needs to be kept within a certain temperature range in order to maintain optimum energy conversion efficiency.
Many metal-based water-cooled and air-cooled heat dissipation packages have been developed for use in compact packages to dissipate heat generated by electronic components. For instance, heat exchangers and heat pipes made of a material with high thermal conductivity, such as copper, aluminum or iron, are commercially available. However, most metal-based heat exchangers and heat pipes experience oxidation, corrosion and/or crystallization after long periods of operation. Such fouling factors significantly reduce the heat transfer efficiency of metal-based heat exchangers and heat pipes. Other problems associated with the use of metal-based heat dissipation packages include, for example, difficulty in precision alignment in mounting bar laser diodes in laser diode cooling applications, issues with overall compactness of the package, corrosion of the metallic material in water-cooled applications, difficulty in manufacturing, etc. Yet, increasing demand for higher power density in small packages motivates the production of a compact cooling package with fewer or none of the aforementioned issues.